Odd Kanjorski Conspiracy Theory Imperils Pro-democracy Agency

July 04, 1993|by DAVID S. BRODER Washington Post Writers Group

The members of Congress are home for the July 4 holiday, and many of them will mark the greatest of our patriotic celebrations by quoting once again the stirring words of the Declaration of Independence.

They cannot be heard too often: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness -- that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

That is the basic credo of democracy, as vital today as it was when first proclaimed 217 years ago. Unfortunately, 243 House members cast some doubt on their understanding of the enduring importance of that message when they voted last month to kill the National Endowment for Democracy, the small government-financed agency that for the past decade has fostered grass-roots democratic movements all around the world.

The endowment is a tiny operation. It employs 46 persons and has a payroll of less than $2 million. The bulk of its money -- $48 million was the amount the House killed -- goes to small, struggling organizations such as the Democratic Development Center in Latvia, which supports politicians, journalists and citizens sniffing the first breaths of freedom.

Rather than channel the grants through a big government bureaucracy, the endowment operates through specially created international arms of four organizations that know a lot about Main Street capitalism and grass-roots democracy -- the Republican and Democratic parties, the Chamber of Commerce of the United States and the AFL-CIO.

The man who led the fight against the endowment in the House is Rep. Paul E. Kanjorski, D-Pa., who has been after its scalp almost from the time he arrived in 1985. Kanjorski tells me he was offended by the attitude a senior endowment official took when the congressman first began inquiring into its operations. His passion on the subject is clear, but his reasoning is not always easy to follow.

In his floor speech, Kanjorski said it was "an insult to the Constitution" to "give taxpayers' money to a private organization to carry on the foreign affairs of the United States." No one in the State Department has ever charged such an act of usurpation, and three presidents have supported increasing levels of funding for the endowment.

Kanjorski is deeply suspicious of the participation of the Republicans, Democrats, business and labor. He spoke of "an unholy alliance" and, in a wonderful non sequitur, said, the endowment "puts together so many unfriendly parties in the bed together that it makes us wonder whether we in fact have not come together in a unicameral legislature."

When I asked him what exactly bothered him about the participation of groups that differ on many issues -- but not on their commitment to democracy -- he replied with another remarkable bit of logic. "They're all operating under the same flag," he said. "That's contrary to our system of checks and balances."

Yet Kanjorski was able to prevail on the House floor against the combined opposition of the President of the United States, the leadership of both parties and the ranking Democrats and Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. In pure political terms, it was quite a feat for an unheralded member with no claim to jurisdiction or special expertise in this area.

The 243-181 roll-call on June 22 was a peculiar vote. Freshman Democrats voted 40-23 to kill the endowment; more senior Democrats, 96-90 to save it. Despite the fact that the endowment was created in the Reagan years and several of the House's most prominent conservatives endorsed it strongly in the debate, Republicans voted 112-62 against it. As with the Democrats, the freshmen led the revolt.

One theory is that the freshmen of both parties were spooked by an ABC-TV news piece the night before the vote -- a piece in which Kanjorski was the only member of Congress quoted and in which the supposedly neutral correspondent said, "Communism may be dead in much of the world, but the endowment is still costing you $30 million a year (last year's appropriation) to support foreign labor unions, small businesses and political activists."

Another, less kindly theory, which might be pondered by proponents of term limits, is that many of the freshmen may lack historical appreciation of the effort it has taken to cultivate democratic movements such as Poland's Solidarity -- an early recipient of endowment help -- and its counterparts around the world.

Backers of the endowment point out that the Cold War may be over, but the triumph of democracy in large parts of Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe is far from assured. All sorts of hostile elements are ready to strangle democracy in the crib. When Americans turned inward after World War I, thinking the world had been "made safe for democracy," what we got was World War II.

Endowment programs -- from legal assistance to political prisoners in China to the teaching of mediation techniques in South Africa to technical aid and training for privatizers in Bulgaria and union organizers in Albania -- do not deserve to be sacrificed to Rep. Kanjorski's conspiracy theories.

The Senate next month has a chance to undo the damage and keep the United States on the side of building democracy in the world.